


Prosecution

by Escalus



Series: Scott McCall Appreciation Week 2019 [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Gen, Justice, Mental Link, Post-Canon, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 23:10:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18375983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Escalus/pseuds/Escalus
Summary: Peter and Scott are captured by Monroe's hunters and put on trial.





	Prosecution

Scott stared at himself in his bathroom mirror. The eyes looking back at him were turning yellow. He pushed his hair, which was as long as he remembered, up out of his eyes. He recognized this face; it hadn’t been his for a long time. He recognized the red hoodie he wore; he hadn’t worn it for a long time, either.

Impossibly, the Wolf Moon hung in the sky behind him in the mirror. When he turned away from the sink and walked out of the bathroom, his feet crunched the leaves that formed a carpet in the Preserve. A cold wind, the type that happens after it stopped raining, made him shiver as it blew past. 

“Why are you doing this?”

There was no answer. Scott continued to tramp through the dark woods. There was a rustling sound to his left, which quickly turned into the stampede of deer. Scott didn’t fall over this time; he didn’t cower from their onslaught. He was too angry to play along.

“You aren’t welcome here!” He shouted. “Get out!”

Finally, he reached the hillside and started climbing down the side of the hill. This time he didn’t fall. It was disorienting, in a way. He knew what was about to happen, but he went through the motions anyway. It was more vivid than a dream, and he had dreamed about this night many times. 

To his left, there was a low, guttural growl like a grinding engine. Scott turned slowly, and there he was. Bestial and eyes blazing red, Peter charged at him as if he had meant to do it once again.

Scott punched the hideous alpha-form on its deformed nose. “Snap out of it!”

The alpha beast reared back, blinked once and then it was Peter. Not the slow transformation, but one second there was a slavering, twisted creature, and then there was Peter, wearing a linen suit of all things.

“What’s going on? Why do you look like that?”

Peter’s voice was nonchalant. Scott’s spent enough time around him to decipher what they truly mean. Peter doesn’t know what’s going on, but he’s decided he doesn’t want to show weakness, so he’s going to pretend he didn’t care.

“We’ve been captured, apparently.” Scott turned on his heel and started walking away. 

“By whom? And where are we?”

“I have no idea who captured us.” Scott kept walking. He could hear Peter hesitate and follow after him. It was probably the safest move given the situation.

He wished that Peter would go anywhere else instead of attempting to follow him, but there wasn’t much chance of that. Hale would do what kept him safest. There were things he didn’t want Peter to see while he was here. There were things he didn’t want Peter to _learn_ while he was here. They emerged from the Preserve in front of the McCall house, as impossible as that was. 

“You’re being awfully quiet, Scott.” Peter’s voice did not hold any command or any tease. It was an accusation. Peter had obviously understood that none of this real; he didn’t think this Scott was real.

Scott sighed. “I have nothing to say to you.” He put his hand on the front door handle and then walked inside, but he found himself in his bedroom, with Peter right behind him. 

“This is your room.” 

“How do you know what my room looks like?”

“I’m not a complete turnip, Scott. I checked it out plenty of times without you knowing.”

Scott turned to say something sarcastic … and woke up on the forest floor in nothing but a pair of basketball shorts. It had been cold that morning, though he had been so scared he hadn’t noticed it. He got up, bushed himself off and waited for Peter to show up. 

He did, and of course, he was once again in his alpha beast form. This time, however, all it took was Scott putting his hands akimbo for the creature took the form of the adult Peter again.

“Are these your memories?” Peter smirked. “Fantastic. We’ve been trapped in your head.”

Scott frowned at the former alpha’s inappropriate humor. “Yes. Try not to mess it up more than you already have.”

Peter took a step forward, putting things together. “These are your memories of … me.”

“Yes. So far, we’ve seen the night you bit me and what happened just after.” 

Scott turned and started walking out of the forest, his bare feet crinkling the leaves. He shivered, but he fought the urge to wrap his arms around himself. He wasn’t going to show any weakness in front of the man who bit him.

“I have to say, this is a pretty unique prison our captor has employed. It makes me wonder.” Peter followed him. He was much more comfortable now that he wasn’t so disoriented. Any minute now, Scott reasoned, he’d start teasing. 

Instead of heading for his home, this time Scott headed toward the school. It wasn’t until he stepped into the parking lot the when his clothes changed once again. No longer was he half-naked, but he was clad in sweats and a t-shirt – a pair he used to sleep in. Suddenly, he was in the school’s back parking lot, and they were surrounded by school buses.

Peter fought off the shift this time. “You don’t seem interested in what’s going on here. What’s the point of this walk through Memory Lane? You’re far too calm, Scott. I think you know what’s going on, and you’re not planning to share.”

Scott stopped before the school bus when he could hear Garrison Myers inside. “You haven’t figured it out yet? I thought you were smarter than me.”

“Now’s not the time to rehash old arguments.” Peter joked.

Scott whirled on him. “This is not a joke.”

Now Peter looked like he did soon after he was revealed, including that truly tacky leather coat. Scott was clad in a towel. Derek wasn’t there when he should be, but both knew what night this represented.

“Are you going to have a memory of me giving you my memories?” Peter winked. “That’s a little convoluted don’t you think.”

Scott snarled at Peter. “Shut up. You don’t really get it – you don’t even realize how much danger you’re in, do you?”

“Not your best insult, Scott, but no, I don’t get it. Maybe you should explain it to me.”

“The person responsible is one of Monroe’s hunters. This is supposed to be torture, but the only torture I’m enduring is the sound of your voice.”

Peter tutted. “This is fairly advanced sorcery, I must say. Why would one of Monroe’s Code-less thugs go through the trouble of putting my mind in yours? Why not just plant a wolfsbane slug into both of our skulls?”

“I don’t know.” Scott replied after a moment. 

“But you have a guess. I thought we were beginning to trust each other, Scott. After all, we’re working together for the mutual survival of all werewolves.”

“I don’t trust you, Peter.” Scott took a step toward Peter and grabbed him by the throat. “I’ve never ever trusted you. I don’t see why you think I would start doing it now.” 

Peter broke out easily. At the look of shock on Scott’s face, he chuckled. “We’re in your memories, obviously. At this point in your life, I was far, far stronger than you are. You were scared of me.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re still scared of me.”

”Of course I’m scared of you!” Scott scrambled back, barely keeping the towel around his waist. “In what possible world would I not be scared of you? Look around you. You cornered me, naked, in the middle of the night with no one around! You somehow sweet-talked Derek into helping you do it. Then you made me experience being burned alive!”

“In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the most effective way to win you to my side. Then again, I was out of my mind.”

Scott walked out of the shower and towards the locker where his clothes would be. “Bullshit.”

“What a mouth you have on you!”

“Shut up, Peter.” Scott ripped open the locker room. “You’ve been trying to sell that same story for years, and no one is buying it. You were out of your mind! Sure. That’s why you managed to avoid the Argents, the police, and Derek, all the while planning and executing a campaign of captor bonding with me.”

Peter raised his eyebrows at that.

“I took psychology during senior year,” Scott pulled a shift over his head. “My point is that you knew the difference between right and wrong!”

“Of course I did. Did you think I was claiming mental incompetence?” Peter scoffed. “No. I’ve been claiming that I was emotionally compromised. You may be slow, but you’re not stupid. You must have realized that my actions indicated I was living completely in the short term. If I had envisioned a future with you as my beta, I would have done things completely differently, but I wasn’t thinking about my survival. I was thinking _only_ about revenge. I wasn’t thinking _clearly._ ”

Scott ground his teeth. He had thought it through before, and he hated the idea. Suddenly, he and Peter were standing next to Memory-Stiles and the broken down jeep. 

“I was right about Peter.” Memory-Stiles worked furiously on the car to hide his anger and irritation. “Try it again!” 

Scott forced himself to look at Stiles. As terrible as this night was, he missed his best friend, far away in Virginia. He glanced at Peter; the omega shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be seeing this. 

“You know,” Memory-Stiles said reproachfully, “I bet you think there’s still something about him that can be saved.” 

Scott said the word because it was the word he said. “Maybe.”

“Awwww, Scott, you do care about me.” Peter smirked at him. 

“Shut up, Peter.”

“Did I make this touching little scenario up?” Peter went on. “No. This was all you. You recognize that underneath everything – no matter to what extremes I went – that I had a motive that was both recognizable and reasonable. You may not have agreed with how I went about doing it, but you recognized that I had a right to do it.”

Scott grasped onto his anchor as tightly as he could. “You had a right …”

Peter lifted his eyebrows as part of a satisfied leer. In the next moment, he got a face full of fist.

And not just a fist. Gauntlets hardened the blow, gauntlets made of leather and iron rings and the bones of dead things. The berserker punched him in the gut, the bone spike on his other fist tearing through Peter’s clothes. In the locker room, Peter had been the alpha, powerful and unescapable. But now the berserker was the alpha. Each blow of his fist sent a thrill of violence up his nerves, feeding the animal spirit like bloody meet to a feral predator. Blow after blow after blow until Peter would stop moving. Until he would be nothing but a bloody stain on the floor of the destroyed temple. 

Too bad this was a memory.

Scott once more tore the skull from his head. “ _Never_ say you had a right to do that to me, Peter. Because next time, we might not be in my head.”

Peter picked himself up off the floor of the Temple of Tezcatlipoca. “You’ve been holding that back for a while, haven’t you?” 

“Well, that’s the point of this,” said a new voice that was actually an old voice. Peter went pale. Scott turned to see a dark-haired woman standing on the other side of the sacrificial altar. He had only seen her dead, so her voice was a surprise.

“You’re not my niece.” Peter growled.

“You’re not my memory,” Scott pointed out. 

“No, but in your minds, I’m anything I want to be.” The false Laura Hale stepped forward so the moon in the broken temple shone down directly to her. “Being Laura reminds both of you of the first and greatest crime of Peter Hale.”

Peter glowered at the intruder. 

“Why are you doing this?” Scott said. “I mean, I understand you have some problem with Peter. A lot of people do. But why get me involved?”

“Don’t you remember?” Laura asked. “You came to save him.”

Scott did remember that. Peter had been taken. There had been signs of a fight at Peter’s ridiculously overpriced apartment, and Scott had had to locate him, in spite of everything. He hated being so predictable. “So you have both of us, but why put him in my memories? Do you get your jollies through mental torture?”

“No.” Laura frowned. “This has nothing to do with torture. It has to do with justice.”

“Lady,” Scott growled. “This has nothing to do with justice.”

The scene shifted and Scott was walking down the hallway of a darkened Beacon Hills High School. He was back to sophomore year. Laura was walking next to him. “It has everything to do with justice. You’ll see. It might surprise you to know that I’m not a very good person.”

“No shit.” Scott took a deep breath; it was the night he had summoned Peter to the school. 

“I’m a misanthrope. I make a very comfortable living cleaning up after other people’s messes. I’ve gotten rich white frat boys out of rape charges. I’ve gotten slimy executives out of fraud charges. I’ve bullied claimants to settle in malpractice lawsuits. When you watch television and see an unscrupulous lawyer, you’re seeing the fictional representation of the reality that is me.”

“Right now, I see Laura Hale.”

“I’m getting to it. Don’t rush me.” Her eyebrows raised in an uncanny imitation of a Hale. Scott realized that he was filling in the blanks in his memories about Laura. 

Laura took a breath and went on. “There was one bright spot in my life. One person who no matter how ruthless I got, no matter how disdainful of my fellow human beings, this person never gave up on me. My brother. He was an idiot. He had a stupid, simple dead-end job in a dead-end town. He’d never make any money. He’d never have any power. But he was happy, and he cared about me.”

Scott took a deep breath. They entered the darkened gymnasium.

“He was a janitor at Beacon Hills High School. Peter Hale killed him and used his body as a prop to teach you a lesson.” Laura shook her head. Scott could hear the blood dropping from that janitor’s body. “So, for the first time in my entire career, I became interested in justice. Pretty sad for a lawyer, eh?”

Peter was there, back in alpha beast form, leering across the gymnasium.

Scott didn’t want to go through this. “Couldn’t you have just sued him?”

“Gerard Argent told me about werewolves. He told me about magic. I spent nearly half my savings on learning magic so I could face Peter Hale as an equal.”

“Gerard Argent is a liar and a user.” Scott stated. “You can’t trust what he told you.”

“I don’t; I am, after all, a very skilled lawyer. I verified through independent sources everything he told me. And after I did so, you know what I realized? I could never get a court to convict Peter Hale.” Laura pointed at the alpha beast, who transformed back into the man. “No human court that recognized the rule of law would do it. Aside from the fact that between Noah Stilinski and the Argents, every scrap of real evidence had been buried, there are people even more influential than me who would block any attempt to expose werewolves to the real world.”

Peter snorted as he walked over, straightening his jacket. “So this is about revenge.”

“Not revenge!” Laura shouted. “Justice. _You_ were getting revenge. I didn’t want to become you.”

“This certainly looks like revenge to me.” Scott proposed. “I’m curious on who you want to get revenge upon. Me or him?”

Laura took in a deep breath. “If this was about revenge, you’d both be dead by now, and your corpses would be burning in some abandoned parking lot. If this was revenge, I could have trapped you in an endless dream, reliving the worst moments of your lives, until your weakened brains gave out. This is about _justice._ You see, Gerard told me that in werewolf packs, there is no court, no judge, no jury. There is only the alpha.”

“I’m not his alpha!” Scott exclaimed as Peter added his own denial. “He’s not my alpha!”

“He’s the closest you’re ever going to get, Peter Hale.” Laura walked into the middle of the gymnasium. “Where would you like to do this, Alpha McCall? Here?” 

They shifted to the Temple of Tezcatlipoca. “Here?”

They shifted to the Hale House. “Here?”

They shifted to the Nemeton, not far from where Scott was bitten. “Here? It’s your choice.”

“Where would I like to do what?”

“Pass judgement!” Laura scolded him. “Accept your responsibility as alpha. Pass judgment on this omega who has preyed on you and your friends, who has preyed on the people of Beacon Hills, for _years._ This is a duty which you have been avoiding.”

Peter harrumphed. 

“He’s had judgment passed on him.” Scott crossed his arms. “I did it before.”

“Oh, yes, you sent him to Eichen House. How long did he stay there? Seven months?”

Peter spoke up. “Hey. That fine establishment is not a walk in the park. The accommodations are outdated and I wouldn’t say much for the company.”

Laura turned on Peter. “Be quiet. This isn’t a court. You don’t get to speak in your own defense, and I think Scott would much rather you didn’t.” Peter was forced once more into the alpha beast form. Tendrils from the Nemeton ripped themselves out of the ground and bound the monster in place. 

“Are you telling me, Scott McCall, that seven months in a rickety asylum is sufficient punishment for his crimes?”

“I’m not telling you anything. You’re the one making me responsible for him.” Scott shook his head. “I have never claimed responsibility over him. I don’t _want_ responsibility over him.”

“But you’ve taken it!” Laura shifted the memory-scape once again. It was a hospital hallway. 

Memory-Derek was being gentle as he sat across from Scott and talked about his mother’s message. Scott wished Derek was here now. “She told me something that changed my perspective on a lot of things. She said that my family didn't just live in Beacon Hills. They protected it. This town needs someone to protect it. Someone like you.”

As an alpha beast, Peter couldn’t talk, but he could snort.

“Being a protector means more than just …” Laura looked around in frustration, but Scott could feel whoever it was shifting around in his memories. “Finding the bodies. You’ve seen Monroe and her followers. I’ve been among Monroe and her followers. How are you protecting people when people like him get to run around free? Because that where Monroe’s people came from. They were people that Peter Hale, and people like Peter Hale, hurt.”

Scott took a step back. 

“They’re coming after you because they think it’s the only way to be safe.” Laura pointed at him. “And they’re right.”

“Where does it end? Humans kill werewolves. Werewolves kill humans. You want me to do your killing for you.”

“This isn’t a misunderstanding! This isn’t some ancient grudge.” Laura shouted. “He murdered, with malice aforethought, eight people. Five of them were directly involved with the murder of his family, one was a professional assassin, but two of them weren’t. He’s guilty, by his own admission, of six counts of attempted murder. Two counts of kidnapping. I could go on.”

“I’m not the police! I’m not the Argents!”

“The police can’t prove it and they can’t stop him. You have the power to do both. I call upon, as witness, your best friend!”

The three of them shifted to the chemistry class room. Memory-Stiles couldn’t bring himself to look at Scott. “Look, you have something, Scott. Okay? Whether you want it or not, you can do things that nobody else can do. So that means you don't have a choice anymore. It means you have to do something.”

Laura got into Scott’s face. “Do you think that’s still true?”

Scott pushed away from the chemistry table. “Yes.”

Laura spread her arms out. “Then I rest my case. You don’t have to do it yourself. All you have to say is – I sentence you, Peter Hale, to death for your crimes – and I’ll take care of the rest. Because I don’t want vengeance – I want justice. And among your kind, that is _your_ call.”

“Death isn’t justice.” Scott stated it loudly.

Laura frowned. “So what is?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.” She snarled, a very human snarl. “He gets to live as a multimillionaire with expensive cars and trips to the Riviera, while his victims rot in the ground. Has he ever once expressed the slightest regret for … let’s say, killing my brother or biting you or gaslighting Lydia?” 

Scott shook his head. “No. He hasn’t.”

“That’s right. Because he doesn’t have any. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I don’t need to be one. His mind is an open book to me; he has no remorse for anything he’s done.” Laura took Scott by the jaw. “Do you know how many times he’s boasted of his prowess in tricking you and your friends? Do you know how many times he’s tried to take credit for what you and Lydia have made of yourselves?”

“I can’t make the call you want me to make.” Scott knocked Laura’s hand away. “I can’t say it’s okay to kill him. I can’t be the person who does that.”

“I know your memories, Scott McCall.” Laura stated severely. “Shall I call them up?”

The room shifted and Scott was panicking in his bathroom, sitting in the shower with his pants on, while claws forced their way out of his fingers, while fangs forced their way out of his jaw.

“This is what he did to you, and then he mocked it as a poor choice on his part. Shall we count how many times you’ve dreamt of remaining a berserker? How many times you’ve dreamed of stabbing Kira to death with a bone knife?”

“Stop!” Scott roared. 

“There is nothing in his actions or his words that indicate that he won’t – say, five years down the road – decide to try again. Next time you might not survive it!” Laura gestured to the struggling alpha beast on the Nemeton, which now sat in Scott’s bedroom. 

“I’m sorry about your brother, but –“

“It’s not you who should be sorry!” Laura exclaimed. “ _You_ didn’t kill him! Peter did. _You_ didn’t mutilate his corpse! Peter did.”

“But I’m partly responsible. My howl lured Peter to the school that night.” 

The alpha beast, struggling on the Nemeton, snorted. 

“Is that why you won’t kill him? Because you made mistakes as a sixteen-year-old boy or a seventeen-year-old alpha?” Laura got into his space. “You should look up the definition of intent. You should discover how important it is to all rational people why you did something. He’s crawled into your head and told you that you’re the same, but you’re not the same.”

Scott drew himself up. “You don’t understand. You’ve been trying to persuade me that Peter is an evil person. That he ruined my life. That he ruined a lot of people’s lives, including yours. _I know that._ You’ve been trying to scare me into doing what you want, but you don’t have to scare me. I’ve always been afraid of Peter.”

“Then why haven’t you done something about him?”

Scott looked at the alpha beast. “Killing Peter isn’t going to bring your brother back. It’s not going to undo my bite. It’s not going to give Lydia the life he stole from her. It’s not going to stop the dreams I have of that skull.”

Scott walked over to the Nemeton and grabbed one of the vines binding Peter and yanked it up.

“I can’t render judgment upon him, not because I think he shouldn’t be judged, but because I think I’m not the person to do it. You can dress it up any way you want, but if I pass sentence on Peter, it won’t be justice, and if I try to call it that, it’ll be a disgusting lie. I hate him, and I fear him, and I resent him, and that makes me biased.”

Laura frowned. “So you wouldn’t mind if I put a bullet in his head.”

“Yes, I would. I think he could be better. I think you could be better.” Scott walked up to her. “I know it sounds like I’m saying let him go, but one of the things I’ve learned is that there is always going to be people like him who insist that everyone is as dark and twisted as they are on the inside. If you let people like Peter Hale determine who you are and what you do, then he wins, and the killing will never stop. I’ll kill to defend someone else’s life, but I’m not an executioner, and _I never will be._ ” 

“So, he gets away with my brother’s murder.”

“I didn’t say that. You’re probably right that you can’t convict him in court or sue for wrongful death, but you’re a powerful sorcerer and a ruthless lawyer. You can’t think of anything else to render Peter harmless?”

Laura jerked in surprise at that statement. Peter growled on the Nemeton. 

“You’d let me do something like that?”

“Dude, I’m not his alpha. I’ll do what I can to stop you from killing him, and I’d probably try to fix him if you turned him into a drooling vegetable, but other than that …” Scott turned to look at Peter. “Last month, Peter handed a fanatical hunter an assault weapon so the man could shoot at me and his own daughter at point-blank range. It was part of his lecturing me for not being ruthless enough. He still doesn’t get it; if I accepted his ideology of killing anyone that threatened me, he’d be the first to go. But I’m not him. On the other hand, I can’t tell you that he’s paid for killing and mutilating your brother, and I’m not going to say that you shouldn’t try to make him pay. I’m a True alpha, not a saint. ” 

Laura studied Peter, her eyes narrowing in thought. 

“One thing though, can you and him get out of my head now? Please?”


End file.
